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Paper Short Abstract:

I will be looking at the regions with earlier experience of collapse, such as the post-socialist regions and ask to what degree has the resulting undoing of commons undermined capacity to respond to future unravellings. I will explore the potential for (re)commoning in such desolate circumstances.

Paper Abstract:

Crises are not only singular events but build on experiences with earlier crises. The regions where a relatively recent collapse is still alive in living memory may thus enter a crisis from a different point and address the elements of crises differently than a region where a collapse is an entirely new experience and potential. Depending on the issues that the earlier crises have triggered, these contexts may be better or worse equipped for handling its results, for example undermined or strengthened mutualities and creation of hierarchies or development of equalities lays the ground for very different potential for crisis commons.

I will be looking at the challenged future vistas through the prism of regions with earlier experience of collapse, such as the neoliberal post-socialist regions, Estonia in particular. I will ask to what degree has the undoing of commons (nearly all of them) in the 1990s and 2000s imposed or enabled a particular mainstream way of living, rather than an alternative one, and whether this has undermined the ways in which the society is prepared for future unravellings. When focusing on the crises threatening survival, commoning appears to mostly be pushed to the background and uncommoning along various dividing lines is advocated. Do the intense processes of uncommoning nevertheless provide any possibility for unexpected emancipatory commons? Might these reach across the divisions created in the cusp of earlier changes and their aftermaths? And finally, are there any ways to increase the capacity for (re)commoning in desolate circumstances in general?